Why Paul Finebaum, SEC sports talk provocateur, is embracing his softer side

New York Times

7 hours ago

DESTIN, Fla. — It's story time in Room 114 of a sprawling resort and spa, an air-conditioned getaway just a few steps from the 89-degree temporary set of 'The Paul Finebaum Show,' which is overlooking the beach for two days as Southeastern Conference coaches and administrators stop by between the meetings they hold here each May.
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Finebaum wears a purple dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, with matching Brooks sneakers that his wife, Linda, gave him the previous July for his 69th birthday. He's sitting at a table with the show's producer, Jamari Jordan, and talking 1984.
By then, Finebaum had exposed cracks in the late stages of Paul 'Bear' Bryant's Alabama program and blown open a basketball recruiting scandal that nearly sent his journalism career in a different direction. He hadn't yet established himself as a professional hater, an SEC lover, operating at a ratio of roughly 1,000 zingers per smile, hosting the most unhinged sports-talk show in history and riding it to fame, fortune and ESPN.
'He's stirred up a lot of s—,' says former Alabama coach Nick Saban, now an ESPN colleague of Finebaum.
Forty-one years ago, then-Alabama football coach Ray Perkins walked out of a news conference when he caught sight of Finebaum. At one point, Finebaum wrote that if there were an Alabama fan left in the state, Perkins would drive to his house and change his mind. On Sept. 29, 1984, Finebaum covered Vanderbilt's 30-21 win at Alabama and typed this into his Teleram word processor: 'Welcome to the state of Alabama — Losersville, USA.' But see, he says now, the dig wasn't just about the Crimson Tide's misery. Rival Auburn came into that season ranked No. 1 by Playboy, among others, and lost its first two games, inspiring Finebaum's written suggestion that Auburn fans 'quit reading Playboy and go back to the Farmer's Almanac.'
Zing.
'Oh, my God!' Jordan says, laughing. 'Where is that Finebaum?'
There's a lot to that answer. The edge still surfaces — a 'SportsCenter' live hit on the same day sees Finebaum question the competence of Georgia quarterback Gunner Stockton, prompting coach Kirby Smart to thank him sarcastically for the motivation.
Sorry about that one, @KirbySmartUGA 😬😬😬 #FineOrNotFine pic.twitter.com/uyWuEfUKk6
— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) May 27, 2025
But this 'founding father' of sports talk, as friend and fellow journalist Gene Wojciechowski dubs him, who was hot-taking and loud-arguing before those were sports media staples, who has always done it his way in the face of convention and consequence, has changed. Or maybe he's just less protective of the non-cartoon side of himself. With two years left on his ESPN deal and a retirement decision to make at that point, it's a side that's more visible. It's a side the COVID-19 pandemic helped uncover, disappointments fueling introspection.
It's a side that 'saved my career,' he says.
Young Finebaum had opinions, too.
College football meant less than baseball and college basketball then. A New Yorker by heritage and a Memphian by birth, Finebaum loved the Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals. His mother, Gloria, was so devoted a New York Giants fan that she heard Bobby Thomson's 1951 'Shot Heard 'Round the World' on a transistor radio in a hospital bed, just before giving birth to Paul's older sister. The biggest heartbreak of young Finebaum's sports life was watching from the St. Louis Arena stands as Bill Walton scored 44 points to lead UCLA past the Memphis State Tigers for the 1973 national title.
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Politics meant just as much. Maybe more. Finebaum's parents knocked on doors all over Memphis in support of Democratic candidates, as they had in New York before the family moved south so Benjamin Finebaum could open an optometry practice. Gloria was an early feminist. As a grade schooler, Paul had three famous addresses memorized — John F. Kennedy's inauguration and 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speeches and Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream.' At 12, he begged to march in a protest parade the day after King was assassinated in his hometown.
He pleaded again a few years later, as a high schooler exasperated by race relations in the South. He and a close friend had an idea to go to a dance together, a Jewish boy and a Black girl, to cause a murmur in that time and place. Gloria liked the sentiment but not the potential fallout, and Finebaum listened.
'I don't have many regrets in life, but that's one,' Finebaum says. 'And this is what, more than 50 years later?'
Rare is the Finebaum story that ends with him not saying what he wanted to say. He started to discover his voice at the University of Tennessee.
Finebaum had to move himself into his dorm. His mother had too much going on, and his father was gone. Benjamin Finebaum had passed away at 49 of a heart attack when his son was 15.
'Everyone is with their parents — it was three years after he died, but that was the day I realized what happened,' Finebaum says. 'It's something you never quite get over. But it also helps you prepare for every other bad thing that happens.'
Pre-law Finebaum was just kind of 'ambling through' college, he says — the hair long, the marijuana smoke thick, the parties he attended with pal and Vols basketball star Ernie Grunfeld 'right out of Hollywood.' He was as interested in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein bylines on the 'Watergate' scandal as any of his studies. Then he saw a job ad for the student paper, The Daily Beacon.
The drudgery of covering student government pushed Finebaum toward sports. Soon, he was sports editor.
'He was the same person then that he is now,' says Wojciechowski, whom Finebaum hired to the Beacon staff. 'Not afraid. No problem challenging authority.'
Hungry for it, even? A particularly sarcastic column about the men's basketball team prompted interim coach Cliff Wettig to ban Finebaum from the team plane (reporters often flew on team charters back then).
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Finebaum eventually talked himself back on. Before one trip, he noticed a Knoxville News Sentinel writer traveling with an official team bag. Finebaum asked how he came to possess it.
'He said, 'By writing good things about the Vols,'' Finebaum remembers. 'Something about that, it just didn't agree with me.'
Finebaum and Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin do a segment overlooking the beach that is awkward to the casual observer and amusing to those who know the history. At one point Kiffin says he was advised not to do it because 'nobody watches the show anymore.' When the lights go off, Kiffin says with a smirk to Finebaum: 'That was great.'
Never Change, @Lane_Kiffin… #WereAtTheBeach pic.twitter.com/LSj4aDrNIF
— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) May 27, 2025
Twelve years earlier, Finebaum got Kiffin fired as the coach at Southern Cal. Or at least that's how Kiffin tells it — that USC's president was watching as Finebaum said on ESPN's 'College GameDay' that a loss that night to Arizona State should be it for Kiffin. Turns out, the Trojans lost, and that was it. Finebaum punctuated his declaration by saying: 'Lane Kiffin is the Miley Cyrus of college football. He has very little talent, but we simply can't take our eyes off him.'
Not only did that turn out to be a bad take on both insulted parties, Finebaum says it infuriated the 'GameDay' crew, because everyone liked Kiffin and because Finebaum read his takedown off a notecard — a no-no on a show that prides itself on being unscripted.
'No one would speak to me,' Finebaum says, but Wojciechowski did later that day, asking him what he was thinking.
'I wasn't angry or anything,' Wojciechowski says. 'I was just questioning his judgment.'
Early in his first year with ESPN, on a 'GameDay' trial run of sorts in advance of the 2014 launch of the SEC Network, Finebaum was already pissing everyone off. His ability to do that at a high rate nearly cost him the opportunity to captain the league's network even though he was the obvious choice. His radio empire was closing in on 30 years, his wacky callers were getting national attention and he was the one media member who seemed to have the respect of Saban amid the coach's dynastic run at Alabama.
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Of course, Saban first learned of Finebaum as LSU's coach from 2000-04 because Finebaum often pissed off LSU fans.
'I knew the power he had with our fan base,' Saban says. 'And I thought he had a pretty good perspective most of the time. Now if you think he's always gonna rub your neck, you've got another thing coming.'
Some in the SEC opposed the hire of Finebaum and his acerbic stylings. But Burke Magnus, ESPN's president of content who helped launch the SEC Network, says other league networks at that point 'were very much state-run media, so we were intent on making the SEC Network different.'
Team Finebaum won, aided by then-SEC commissioner Mike Slive. This fueled detractors, such as former Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, who have called Finebaum an 'unabashed SEC water carrier' — Finebaum prefers 'core defender' — as did the 2014 New York Times bestseller Finebaum wrote with Wojciechowski titled, 'My Conference Can Beat Your Conference: Why the SEC Still Rules College Football.'
Still, he got right into it with then-South Carolina athletic director Ray Tanner in 2013 after Finebaum criticized Gamecocks star Jadeveon Clowney on ESPN. This was SEC tradition — more than 30 years earlier, Finebaum wrote a column ripping then-SEC commissioner Roy Kramer for inviting South Carolina to the league. It was pre-internet, pre-national platform, yet Finebaum's first walk to the press box at South Carolina was like Mad Max entering the Thunderdome.
'A number of times I thought there was going to be a physical confrontation,' says one of Finebaum's best friends, Gene Hallman, who accompanied Finebaum that day.
The start of that relationship? Hallman meeting with Finebaum to get publicity for a golf tournament, and Finebaum writing in the Birmingham Post-Herald the event would be lucky to last three years.
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That's the thing about Finebaum, through his negativity, through multiple death threats that required involvement from authorities, through the hats and sunglasses he used to wear around Birmingham to avoid catcalls, through 'Go to Hell, Finebaum' signs held up by cheerleaders at games: People end up liking him.
He and Kiffin talked it out shortly after Miley Cyrus Saturday and have been on good terms since.
When Dr. Linda Hudson moved back home to Birmingham in 1989 after a 3-year residency at Vanderbilt, soon to embark on a career in internal medicine, a neighbor in her apartment complex told her Finebaum lived upstairs.
'I was thinking to myself, 'Who really cares?'' Linda says. 'He was not a likeable sort.'
They'll be married 35 years on Sunday.
'He can be a bit of a curmudgeon on the air,' ESPN and SEC Network host Laura Rutledge says of Finebaum, 'but what people miss about him is his incredible generosity and kindness.'
This life has afforded Finebaum experiences he'll never forget with Bill Murray and Magic Johnson, and a friendship with Apple CEO and Auburn grad Tim Cook. It has endeared him to rapper Lil Wayne, who proclaimed in a 2023 song: 'I'm tryna talk to 'em like Paul Finebaum.'
But the political interactions are the stuff of a self-aware Forrest Gump. Another 1984 story: Finebaum had dinner with a group that included Donald Trump the night before the USFL season opener in Birmingham. Trump, owner of the New Jersey Generals, sat down with Finebaum in the press box before the game and gestured to the league-record crowd of 62,300 at Legion Field.
'He said, 'You see this crowd?'' Finebaum recalls. ''This place is sold out. Because of me.''
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan has stopped Finebaum on the Mall in Washington to ask him about Wisconsin football. A birthday trip for Linda to New York to watch Barbra Streisand in 2017 ended up backstage. And of course Bill Clinton wanted to talk Arkansas football. Hillary Clinton, months removed from losing the 2016 presidential election to Trump, tried to hurry her husband along.
'He ignored her,' Finebaum says. 'Probably not for the first time.'
A few months after that, the Finebaums were in Los Angeles when a fan on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills invited them to a fundraiser that night in Malibu. It was at the house of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They hung out with actor Larry David, and Finebaum got into a game of Kennedy touch football.
'I've also played golf with Dan Quayle,' Finebaum says of the former vice president. 'I hate to be insulting, but is playing golf with Dan Quayle something you brag about?'
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Zing.
The trappings of the job satisfied. The job itself eventually didn't, in part because Finebaum wanted to be more of a presence on ESPN.
'I took the SEC Network for granted,' Finebaum says. 'I don't think I fully understood what it represented.'
Finebaum says ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro asked him in 2019 to do one more season on 'SEC Nation,' the SEC Network's 'GameDay'-like preview show, originating each weekend from an SEC campus. Then he could be an ESPN studio presence on game days. Finebaum agreed. And he had other things on his mind.
A sitcom based on Finebaum and his callers was in the works, purchased by ABC. 'Bless Your Heart' was the initial working title, with actor Jason Biggs on board to play a young Finebaum.
As one of three executive producers of the show, Finebaum was set for a thrill and a big payday. He was told that if the show got to syndication, 'you'll own your own island.'
COVID-19 ended all that.
'It's like your high school crush,' Finebaum says, 'who you still can't talk about.'
But the months ahead ended up being more about discovery than loss.
LSU athletic director Scott Woodward finishes his beach segment with Finebaum on the College Football Playoff format, the transfer portal and paying players, and Finebaum asks him off-air how those meetings are really going. Woodward responds: 'Everybody's wigging out.'
That's a fair assessment of college athletics at large. It is facing an 'existential threat,' Finebaum says. Still, as he reminds an auditorium full of fans in a question-and-answer session in Destin, the passion of the college football fan has not waned.
And 'existential' has a heavier meaning for Finebaum. The pandemic saw Linda go from beating breast cancer to battling misinformation daily as a medical professional.
It left Finebaum's show as the SEC Network's only live, daily offering. This meant angry conversations about the virus and safety measures as Finebaum brought on epidemiologists. It also gave Finebaum a renewed sense of purpose, he says, and changed the vibe of the show to that of a 'classic support group.'
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'It went from being contentious to people calling in and saying, 'I lost my grandfather and we couldn't go to the funeral,'' he says. 'Now if you put it on for a random day, it's, 'I just got Stage 4 cancer.' 'So did I.' It's like a Facebook family from 20 years ago.'
Families do have their differences. Radio consultants have told Finebaum that 'there's not a sports show in America that has a more pro-Trump audience than I do.'
'So what does that mean?' he says. 'You have to be cognizant and respectful, whether you agree or not, of who your audience is.'
He says he belongs to neither party and votes for both in this politically polarized era. He has friends in each camp. Tommy Tuberville. Kaitlan Collins. Doug Jones. Laura Ingraham. Finebaum was close with his mother until her death in 1994, though she did hang up on him the first time he admitted to voting Republican.
'You live and you realize how much gray there is in the world,' Linda says. 'As Paul has gotten older he's brought that more to his show, encouraging people that it's OK that everyone doesn't feel the way you do, do what you do, root for the team you root for, vote for the president you voted for. We can disagree and still be human.'
Things can still get nasty. Famed caller 'Jim from Tuscaloosa' wished a heart attack on Finebaum on the air in 2024 after Finebaum deemed him delusional. But he is as close with his callers as ever, eulogizing several of them, giving out his personal number and spending time with them. He recently talked Rusty Garner, also known as 'I-Man,' through a cancer diagnosis.
'He respects them — they are not props to him,' Wojciechowski says.
'There's a different side to Paul,' Garner says, and Wojciechowski saw that in another way in the fall, when Finebaum — who takes pride in mentoring young journalists — told Wojciechowski's University of Tennessee journalism class that the attention-seeking approach of his youth may have been flawed.
Finebaum asked back on to 'SEC Nation' before the 2021 season. Now he's focused on what he does best, for the two years left on his deal and perhaps beyond. Or he could choose to retire. He rarely opines on his own show. He says he conducts it as 'the head minister.'
Which is interesting because Finebaum has grappled with faith for decades. He grew up attending an Orthodox synagogue and still practices Judaism in honor of his parents — 'Synagogues of the SEC' is a book idea, he jokes. But he has explored Christianity and considered converting to Catholicism with Linda, who was raised Methodist.
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'I believe in God and very strongly in faith, but it has been a challenge to find my way,' Finebaum says. 'As I got older and opened my eyes to other things, it really helped me. … It's a lifelong journey for me.'
Pause.
'Whatever that means.'
Zing.
The show ends, having had its radio family replaced for two days by SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, Kiffin and most of the big names in SEC athletics, a dream list of guests. Finebaum considers what's next.
'Tomorrow afternoon, Legend will be back,' he says. 'And Jim from Tuscaloosa. Swamp Dog. Squirrel. I can't wait.'
(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; Photos: Courtesy of Paul Finebaum; Jeffrey Vest / Getty Images)